New Orleans Finding myself in New Orleans, I accompanied my companera to the Honor Awards night of the district council of the American Legion. Debra Campbell, a key leader in ACORN’s affiliate, A Community Voice, and co-chair of the Upper 9th Ward chapter, was receiving their award as Citizen of the Year. The crowd was small, but the tradition was large. A chair was set out for POW/MIAs. There was prayer at opening and closing. The pledge of allegiance saw hats off and hands on heart. Debra was magnificent, as was Rev. Richard Bell, the Legion’s adjutant, and co-chair of ACV’s Lower 9th Ward group. There was a lot of talk about leadership, which I found interesting, even if not surprising.

Some of the concerns about leadership are implicit critiques of President Trump. The New York Times editorial focused on the way General Martin Dempsey, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Obama, seemed to be tweeting leadership tips in the hopes that they might influence the President. Good luck with that, eh?

I have been paying more attention to these comments and examples, while preparing for the leadership training sessions in Milwaukee with newly elected officers of Amani United. The military does leadership-talk constantly, but that might not be a recommendation for source material, despite their experience. To some degree leadership is out of vogue. There’s a lot of talk out there these days about flat-leadership systems or even leaderless formations. For example, the French government has been pulling its hair about how to negotiate with the Yellow Jackets who are militantly refusing to identify a leadership structure for their movement. The media worked hard to anoint leaders for #BlackLivesMatter, the Women’s March, and even Occupy with various levels of success. Some seized the mantle and others ran from it.

I stumbled onto a book, How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t by Leslie Crutchfield based on work by a center that looks at these issues at Georgetown University. Part of their argument was impossible to swallow, like their habit of equating the achievement of some major social changes with their definition of what were social movements, or their view that when corporations were forced to adapt to pressure and larger social changes and watershed events that made business in fact leaders. Nonetheless, there were some interesting quotes about leadership, regardless of the context, that I thought would be useful in the training sessions. Crutchfield also argued that success for social movements was greater when they were more focused on the grassroots up, than the other way around which was spot on. Another direct hit was the need for organization’s and movements to be something called “leaderfull.” It’s an awkward term that gets sort of stuck in the throat as it comes out, but the bottom line is indisputable. An organization with more leaders at all levels with the ability – and coordinated autonomy, as I’ve always called it – to operate actively and powerfully has the best chance of success.

Leaders matter. It’s worth the work to spend as much time as we can to help them develop to their full potential, just as we see with Debra Campbell and Richard Bell. A lot to learn and a lot to teach.

Greenville In New Zealand we were asked, “How is New Orleans?” In California, whether Santa Rosa or Sonoma, the question arose, “How is New Orleans?” Thirteen years have passed since Hurricane Katrina swept through the city, and the question is still important, “How is New Orleans?” The answer: better than it was, but not as good as it needs to be.

That’s not a whine, just a statement of fact. Another new Mayor is now in charge, our first woman, an African-American again, and our first non-native born in a long, long time. There’s hope mixed with thirteen years of cynicism. Too many plans have been made without enough progress.

The big local television station reached out for ACORN’s affiliate, A Community Voice, so that they could dig deep into the lingering impacts felt by one of their leaders, Gwen Adams. They wanted to tell the story through a personal lens, but her organizational t-shirt cries out about how political this is. Gwen lives within a spit of the levee in the lower 9th ward. She was a union teacher in the New Orleans Public School System. She was fired like thousands of others, and despite the fact that she was a former Teacher-of-the-Year in Orleans Parish, she was never offered a return to work. She was also unwilling to go to work at lower pay, forfeited retirement and other benefits, and no job security or protection for a charter operator. She is now a sometimes substitute teacher. She is a great ACORN and ACV leader. These are the facts.

The facts are also being reckoned with in Puerto Rico almost a year after the island was slammed by Hurricane Maria. The governor there actually apologized, which is a refreshing surprise. He also announced that the death total is now estimated at near 3000 people compared to the earlier estimates that were hardly one-hundred. In the same report, the news story mentioned that the death total from Katrina is still not known absolutely. The governor noted that they had no disaster plan that assumed no power, no highway access, and no communication. George Washington University in the District of Columbia has been doing a study for them, but it is hard to believe there will be any surprises.

A spokesperson for the Milken Institute argued that the lesson of Puerto Rico is “focus as much as possible on lower-income areas, on people who are older, who are more vulnerable.” A survey from Kaiser Health Foundation and others in Texas in the wake of Harvey found that the same populations were still suffering there. We all thought that was also the lesson learned from Katrina thirteen years ago.

When are we going to be willing to really act on the lessons we keep being taught after disasters? No one seems to know – or act on – the lessons we keep being forced to learn at the price of suffering and death.